LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 57 – Offender Profiling, Criminal Behavior, and Prolific Offending ft. Dr. Bryanna Fox (University of South Florida)

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

In this episode of LPRC CrimeScience, we welcome Dr. Bryanna Fox, Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Faculty Affiliate of the Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida. She joins Dr. Read Hayes to discuss burglaries, latent class analysis, law enforcement, offender and event profiling, the history and evolution of profiling, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 57 – Offender Profiling, Criminal Behavior, and Prolific Offending ft. Dr. Bryanna Fox (University of South Florida) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. operations, and customer service. Bosch Integrated Security and Communication Solutions spans zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast, coming to you from my case, Gainesville, Florida. And we've got Dr. Brianna Fox of USF, presumably from the West Coast, the Tampa area, joining us today. And so, you know, your experience and background seem to have prepared you well for what you're doing. And I've got a little bit of law enforcement

and some loss prevention that helped me become a research scientist. But maybe you could talk to us not just about your background, but how that's informed how you look at the world and what you think is important and how you approach things. Well, I would say just in general, having any affiliation or work in law enforcement taught me what is most important in terms of who that law enforcement are facing. Homicide is incredibly important from a victim standpoint, and I mean, from a law enforcement standpoint as well, but thankfully, they're not the most prevalent crimes. And when they do occur, they tend to be solved at higher

rates so we can prevent future offenses by catching the offender and trying to get justice for the victims. In comparison, property crimes tend to occur far more often and are way less solved. So these offenders are out there able to reoffend again and again and again and victimize more people. And it's incredibly frustrating for law enforcement, and it's obviously very devastating for victims. So I think that that taught me what we need to focus on because we have a problem with property crimes. So the team we've had here at UF, this is probably our 19th year, really from almost the beginning to take up on your theme and your intro was, we're here to safeguard vulnerable people and places. And we're trying to do that better through research.

So, you know, I like that. And the victimization is really where we always try and start and end and understand the ripple effects of those things. And so it seems you've done a lot of work around burglary, which is of particular interest to our retail group here. They've got burglary, of course of particular interest to our retail group here. They've got burglary, of course, of the customers or employees' vehicles in the parking lot. They've got them of their stores, their distribution centers, their offices, their tractor trailers, and so on. Maybe we can talk a little bit about, because we're going to go into profiling a little bit,

but I know starting out with something that's a little more simple and that's a little simpler and maybe understandable, and that's typology and how you've looked at burgers themselves and looking at typologies and classifications would be helpful too. Yeah, so that was one thing I tried to do with my PhD when I was going through at the University of Cambridge, looking at how can we help law enforcement to solve more of these burglaries in particular. I was really interested in other types of serial offenses, particularly serial killers, but it doesn't take long for you to realize that there's millions of burglaries and luckily just not as many serial killers. So I thought, well, how can we apply a method that's been useful in the past and try to tailor it towards

property crimes and increase the solvability for those cases? So what I did was get data on hundreds of solved burglaries. We needed them to be solved so we can look and see the relationships between the types of crimes that were committed and the way they were committed and then the people who were responsible for committing them. And we know that there's a lot of variation. We don't see burglaries just being committed in one straight way. There's tons of different ways that people can go about it from using a more premeditated approach where they bring a crowbar with them or they have a lock pick or they'll do something that's more, I guess you can say professional, like casing the place or looking out for surveillance cameras. And it's very different than the more opportunistic burglaries, which someone may see a door open and just decide to, you know, go right in. And those are two different styles. So we thought, well, maybe there's a relationship between the way people commit burglary and the type of people that commit burglary.

And that's what led to the development of a statistical typology for burglary. You know, I absolutely love it. You may or may not know, I think many of our listeners do, we've done somewhat similar research with primarily shoplifters. We work now with porch pirates and some others, but we're really trying to do like you, but we're combining sort of qualitative, rigorous interviews with the known offenders. And we've used a few different styles.

We'll recruit a few or we'll work with a retailer to talk to initial and then snowball sample from there. So now we're getting their insights, a lot of good data there, as well as looking at the cases themselves, the attempts. We're looking at all attempts that we've got and that we can document. But we find, of course, the same thing that burglaries we know about, shoplifting we may or may not know about. So it's a lot easier to study that. Or also we have to look at armed robbers. So looking, I think one thing is of interest to me particularly, you know, I went to part of my grad at Leicester University, also in the UK. But what are some of your experiences, by the way, in differences in offenders and offending,

if you have that insight, between the UK and the US? And I know they're pretty heterogeneous, both of them, but are there any differences that you saw that might be interesting? Well, I only looked at burglaries in the UK for one project, which we did have in the security journal. And we saw that in the UK, burglars tend to be, I'd say, a little bit more organized. And the reason that we saw that is the houses are typically very close together. There's a lot more, you know, what they call attached housing.

So they're, you know, in a row. In the United States, a lot of people have houses that are detached, separate from each other. So, you know, you know your neighbors a lot better. You know when somebody is coming and going that maybe doesn't belong because you never see them before. We also noticed that we see a lot more prevalent in the UK, and so that helps to prevent burglaries. And of course, just the fact that there's alley gating, which is where they put up gates on alleys, so it's more difficult for somebody to get into an alleyway unless they get into their backyard and then reduce maybe the visibility of a burglar. That helps to prevent burglary. So all of these things play a role, and some of the more organized and sophisticated burglars are actually able to find ways to avoid that, which was really interesting. Versus in the U.S., in my site in particular, which was in central Florida, a lot of people just leave their doors and windows open and they have a detached house with a big yard. So there's not neighbors nearby. They may not know their neighbors that well.

There's not neighbors nearby. They may not know their neighbors that well. So when people come or, you know, are on their property or doing something, it's harder to see or maybe harder to recognize somebody doesn't belong. role at the LPRC is to help the retailers think about things more deeply and broadly and use more diagnostics to understand mechanisms, but meanings and context. And that's what you're talking about. So even very simply, it's a little more difficult on average, maybe to burglarize a residence in the UK because of those reasons you talked about, clustering and things like that, than here. And so you're going to see different people maybe, and of course, using different tactics. And it's almost like heuristics. I guess you learn and you get weeded out like everything else. So you mentioned, and I've seen in a couple of your papers, that there are differences, there are

meaningful differences, and you use LCA or different statistical techniques to try and tease out types of burglars. And what was meaningful in that? What are some of the classifications you all have found? And how is that meaningful to burglary crime? And then maybe, of course, you and I are particularly interested in helping prevent that type of victimization. Yeah, those are all great questions. And those are the things that I was most interested in because, again, I thought, how can we do something that's useful for law enforcement and also the community?

People don't want to be burglarized, so they don't want to have things stolen from them. They don't want to be the victims of crime. So all of that were important considerations when we were developing this work. But we found in general that when you look at the types of crimes that are committed and the types of people that commit those crimes, the behaviors that they show, the features that they have, there are generally four subtypes. And the unique thing about our work is we use this thing called latent class analysis, LCA, as you said, which is a very objective statistical analytical technique. In the past, dating back to the more, you know, famous profiles like by the FBI, they had smaller samples. The FBI's famous profiles were developed with 36 cases. And rather than using a statistical technique, which sometimes can see things and pick up on

things that the human eye can't, those profiles were developed using a more subjective or clinical approach where they, you know, look at patterns in the cases and then they think about, well, what are the unique, you know, defining features and how many typologies or profiles do I think exist within these different cases? So we thought, well, using a more advanced statistical method will help get a more accurate typology. So I can talk more about that in a minute, but just to begin, there were four different subtypes that we found, the organized, disorganized, opportunistic, and interpersonal burglars. Now to start out with the organized, that's a little bit of a namesake from the FBI organized disorganized typology which they created. We found organized and disorganized burglars both exist. The organized burglars were very premeditated. They like to

bring tools with them to the scene. They like to think about and case the places before they would offend. They often would know the victim, maybe not personally, but let's say they were otherwise gainfully employed as tree trimmers or they were doing yard work or they had some other gig that may have let them meet somebody, let them know their schedule, let them know when they're going to be away. Or these people would burglarize commercial establishments, which are far more difficult because they are more likely to have security cameras and proper security. So when they chose to go after those types of places, they obviously had to be more sophisticated in order to have any hope of getting away with it.

And they were actually very successful. The organized burglars were, on average, most likely to get away with their offenses. The disorganized burglars were pretty much the opposite from them. They were far more reckless and impulsive, spontaneous. They would pick a place that wasn't necessarily with a lot of a forethought. They would find something at the scene, let's say a rock, or even put their own arm through a window and just to get inside, break the window. Sometimes they would be high or drunk when they did this, and sometimes they were only looking to find something to sell or pawn just quick enough that they could make a quick return on investment and buy more drugs or something that they wanted. ransacked the inside, and oftentimes that was a key giveaway to when people came home and they knew right away they'd be burglarized. Even if something relatively small was taken, they would know right away they were burglarized. The third style was the opportunistic burglar, and as we

spoke about earlier, they were the ones that would see an opportunity and take it upon themselves to make use of it. So a door or a window would be left open, or maybe they were the ones that would see an opportunity and take it upon themselves to make use of it. So a door or a window would be left open, or maybe they were, you know, trying handles and seeing, hey, where can I get lucky and see if someone left it unlocked. So they didn't necessarily pick out a place in advance. And they also didn't exactly, you know, just see whatever means possible with any risk level possible. They seem to have a balance between, you know, just see whatever means possible with any risk level possible. They seemed to have a balance between, you know, picking something that was a little easier to offend against, but also a little less risky.

They tended not to take a lot of high value items. And the things that they took were more maybe keepsakes or mementos or things for themselves. These were often younger people, teenagers or kids. Maybe they were out early from school or they were bored and looking for something to do. And sometimes they would take things like video games or things that would be meaningful or beneficial for them, but maybe wouldn't get you a lot of money out on the market if you brought it to a pawn shop. The last group would be interpersonal burglars. And this is something that's relatively unique to Florida by the way we define burglary here. Burglary in Florida is entering a dwelling that's not your own with the

intent to commit a felony therein. And so the felony could be anything like stealing, you know, larceny, all the way up to, you know, vandalism, sexual assault and battery, or even homicide. So that interpersonal group, while they would sometimes steal things, and there was larceny inside and theft, they would sometimes be doing it as a way to get back at somebody, almost like out of revenge, or they were doing it, I think, to test the waters for a different type of crime. Let's say sexual assault or something more serious. And I say that because there were cases where these people in our sample went on to go on and commit these more serious offenses. We tracked them for a few years and we saw that.

So we thought maybe that was a way they were testing the waters. And we have looked and seen in research relating to serial killers and rapists that a lot of them do have burglary in their background. So those are the four types of burglary we found. That's excellent. found. That's excellent. And I think a little bit about, all right, are there ways that law enforcement, that communities can leverage that information, that way about thinking about the offenders and the actual crimes themselves based on some of your research? So that was another paper we did from that data set.

We wanted to see from our repeat offenders how stable they were in committing this type of offense over and over and over. Does somebody go from a disorganized offense to organized, opportunistic? Do they bounce around or are they relatively stable? And this is important because if we know that somebody organized burglaries over and over and over again, if we see a string of organized burglaries in one section of town, it can help you to potentially narrow down the people that you want to interview or at least have on your radar. it does not mean that they did it.

You still need all the normal levels of probable cause and beyond to be able to make an arrest and prosecution. But it does help to limit the scope of it when at the beginning an investigation is, you know, everybody. You've, you know, thousands of burglaries that happen in a given area over a certain period of time, and it can be very difficult to even narrow that down. And one thing I learned from working in a police department is there's so many burglaries and thefts that happen every single day, and how few detectives there are in their property crimes unit. What would typically happen, and I would see this happen, is there's six cases that get put on a detective's desk in the morning. And they say, no, here you go. Those are from last night. And pretty much their work that day is to try to solve

those six cases. And if they don't, the next day, there's six more cases, and then six more cases the next day, and on and on and on. So there's a very short window and only a few hours that you have available to try to make any headway in all these cases. So if you notice that there's a pattern of burglaries occurring and it seems likely that this could be related to other burglaries happening and you can pool evidence between them, that's called crime linkage analysis. and you can pool evidence between them. That's called crime linkage analysis. Or you can look and see if there was a past case of similar burglaries in that area of the same style. It can just help you to either identify potential people that you want to focus on and then see, you know, do they have an alibi? Is there any witnesses?

Is there any footage that may match the person? Or to potentially limit down if you have many suspects, you know, who, if I only have a few hours, who do I want to go, you know, in every first, second, third, fourth, and so on. So that was all basically theoretical, though. We did not have any reason to believe that that would actually work out in practice. And so that was another study we did from this project. It was the first ever experiment looking at how effective using these types of typologies are in practice. Even dating back to the FBI profiles and all the ones that have come since then, we'd almost no knowledge about how effective they are when you use them in practice. Some research done in the UK and here in the US and Canada suggests that they're anywhere between 2.6% effective or as high as just above 60% effective.

So that's a wide range, and we don't know, in the end of the day, are they even any better than a coin toss, which would be 50% effective. So for this experiment, we trained one police department to use these different profiles, and we trained their crime analysts on how to do things like crime linkage analysis and identifying patterns over time. And we just said, you know, use this typology and continue on your normal investigations otherwise. There were three other departments that participated, but all they did was just continue their investigations as normal. They did not use the typologies in any way. And at the end of the year, we compared the clearance rates, so how many arrests were made for burglary cases between the two departments. And the department that was using these typologies solved about 300% more burglaries than the departments that had not been using the typologies. And that department had started off with a lower clearance rate to begin with.

So they not only surpassed the other departments, but they far surpassed them. But I should say not 100% of the burglaries were solved. This is not a foolproof method. It does not cure everything. And it certainly doesn't solve all cases. If it did, I would be a millionaire. But it did improve their clearance rate, but it didn't solve 100% of cases.

And 300% sounds like it's possibly statistically and certainly substantively significant. It was a statistically significant difference over time. And it was statistically significant when we compared that treatment group from their initial clearance rate from before to after. But it was also a statistically significant difference from our control groups in just the post-test period. There you go. Perfect. I think I'm looking at that paper right this second. Excellent. So that's fantastic. So there you go. I think you start with thought. There's a logic model here. You can start to tease out some hypotheses. And then

now you're going to go out and you're going to test them in different ways, including an experimental design. So fantastic. And then further now, the walkaway is, you know, this, like you say, we talked about this with our, with our, the people we're doing all this research for is, you know, there is no silver bullet. There will never be. And we see this in medicine and everything else that it's if you can get beyond, like you said, random, a coin flip, and it's substantively helpful. And in the business cases, normally that needs to be cost effective somehow. You know, there's a cost benefit.

But, okay, excellent. So I think the next thing is to ask you a little bit about profiling you touched on it a little bit um and we know it's it comes from a lot of places but in this case um looking at profiling crime scenes and and um profiling the events to to see if that helps us and you mentioned that, and I've seen a little bit in the literature, as you mentioned, that it is really all over the place. And is it even better than just guessing? Can you talk a little bit about, from your perspective, and I know you've done a lot of review on this and discussion around it, you know, the genesis of more systematic,

particularly with serial killers or other crimes against persons, but we all know who's famous and about this. Can you talk a little bit about that, Dr. Fox? Where did profiling maybe come up with, come from, their origin, and then how's it evolved and to how we think about it now, and then we can go from there. Absolutely. So profiling was a relatively old idea. They started it before even World War II, but that was one of the things that they had used

when they were trying to get an assessment of the psychological fate of Adolf Hitler. assessment of the psychological fate of Adolf Hitler. And they were just, again, based upon behaviors at an abstract level, trying to understand more about the features and the psychology of the person behind those behaviors. So that's the underlying foundation of all offender profiling, that the crime or the behavior reflects the criminal or the person who is doing that behavior. So that then was taken into the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, where I used to do research. They had decided at one point they wanted to learn more about why people commit crimes. Oftentimes, law enforcement is focused on solving the crime, and that's what they're there for, to enforce the law and solve crimes. But there was never much of a focus on who's the offender behind the crime and why did

they do it. So the FBI's DSU had a few agents who were then called profilers that went out and did some interviews, a little bit off the books because they weren't exactly authorized. And they started interviewing some of the most famous serial killers of the time, Charlie Manson, Ted Bundy, and others. They really wanted to get an idea of why did these people go on to commit such heinous offenses? And they found some very interesting things that made them think there were two different types of offenders. The organized, they were very planned and intellectual, sophisticated, charming. They had a plan and they enacted it. And the disorganized offenders,

which were very impulsive and brutal and haphazard and were very socially inept and didn't have a lot of sophistication in life or in their offenses. And so that was the original, you know, famous profile. And that really set the tone for all the profiles that have been developed for, you know, all these different types of crimes ever since then. In the about four decades since that occurred, there have been hundreds, actually, of papers and books and chapters and articles written about offender profiling. My colleague David Farrington and I did a meta-analysis, which was published in Psychological Bulletin two years ago, basically evaluating every single profile that was ever published and developed and talked about to date. And we found that not only is there great variation in the methods that are

being used these days, people are still proposing these very clinical style profiles, such as the ones that the FBI proposed, where it was more based upon a subjective view of your interview and qualitative data, all the way up to very sophisticated, quantitative, and very objective techniques, such as latent class analysis and others, that were more prevalent today in the more recent era. We also found a lot of interesting changes in terms of who's developing these profiles. In the early years, in the 1970s and 1980s, this was predominantly done by the FBI profilers and psychologists. But more and more, it's being

done not only by psychologists, but also criminologists, mathematicians, geographers, people from a broad array of fields that are getting involved in this crime-solving process. But we also found that in the past decade, not a single paper or profile has been proposed from the FBI's behavioral science units. it. So it's shifted entirely to a more academic approach, for sure, but also, I think, a more statistical and scientific approach, which is a very good step in the right direction, I would say, because we don't want to be giving any type of, you know, I guess, treatment or program to a police department or to the community and saying, this is what you should do, if we're not pretty sure that it's accurate and it'll work. So that was a big concern of mine. And that's what led to that paper and all the research that I've done since. Excellent. Yes. Big proponent of evidence-based practice. And again, my father and grandfather being physicians, I kind of grew up

reading their journals, believe it or not, and listening to these horribly boring tapes and things. But yes, it's still not perfect, but if we've got some logic model, some framework, and then we start to test that as rigorously as we can with maybe different mixed methods, that's a huge start, and that's going to help us refine things. So that's interesting to help us refine things. So that's the interesting about profiling. And that's where we know what's who the rich and famous are on that because of the, you know, so much television programming and movies and things like that, entertainment. And that's been

very helpful. What's the, what was the Genesis starting in World War II with Hitler? And, and there are probably many examples out there and then how that's evolved where we're trying to look at what's happened and then what do we infer from that. That's our role here at UF on our team is to, that's great, but what can we take away from that to now change the dynamics to better deter and disrupt offenders, maybe even keep them from initiating, but definitely from progressing. So what are some examples of profiles that have been developed by others? You mentioned who's developing profiles, psychologists, special agents assigned to the unit at that time or others out there. What do profiles look like? What are some different types of profiles? We talked a little bit about a typology, but a profile sounds different than a typology.

Yeah, I think typology, there's slight difference in terminology. Sometimes it's just that people don't want to use the word profile because of some connotations it has in terms of the police are only going to be looking at one person to the exclusion of others or the idea that there's some components of the profile that are racially motivated or biased. And so I think that there's at least some inclination to just make sure that we're not associating or confusing this with that because that's not what this is. In particular, it's why I advocate so much for an evidence-based offender profile or typology where we're not considering those types of things in the profile. in the profile, it's about behaviors at the crime scene with more background and demographic and features of the offender, such as age, gender, if they live close by to the scene, if they've committed many crimes like this in the past, if they have a car, those types of things, which

actually are far more predictive in terms of what types of crimes they are going to commit. are far more predictive in terms of what types of crimes they are going to commit. So a typology, though, one thing that is unique about that is it's often relating both the crime scene behavior and the offender features. So we see sometimes that there will be a profile developed just of different crime types or just of different offender types, but they don't necessarily link the two together. And I think that there could be some misinformation about what a typology or profile is, depending on whether we're talking about if it's just about offenses, just about offenders, or if it's linking the two together. Fantastic. We're in this, I don't know, unenviable position of looking at behavioral

cues and clues that not only might help us understand what has happened or what is happening, but also, as you talked about, what might be getting ready to happen and going a little beyond God. And so we've just been looking at what signals does somebody maybe give off through their utterances or postings, their interactions or spatial movements and things like that, but just trying to understand those clusters. So we call it cues and clusters in context, you know, if you will, to understand what might signal that. And let's say in the shoplifting case, for example, where, okay, we've just seen a vehicle pull in and park in the fire lane. The passenger got out. We noticed that they kind of backed in it, that there's no license plate on the vehicle. And

now the person comes in and they circle the perimeter of the inside of the store. And then they immediately go to a specific location. They don't seem to be looking at the merchandise. They seem to be looking around, looking for cameras or people, presumably. Their hands are down, not up, evaluating the merchandise. They produce a tool, so on. So we see these cues and clusters that are in this context in an attempt to discern, well, why would I pay attention if I

was an employee, a store detective to one person over another? You know, it's not because, as you mentioned, a physical characteristic or anything like that. So any thoughts on that? Because that's more of a predictive, as you mentioned, versus more of a forensic exercise where, okay, I've got this crime scene and I'm seeing these things. And my experience or some education I've got are saying, if you see these clusters of evidence of behavior that happened before, what are your thoughts on different types of, and I'm like you, we like to use the term profiling, but using behavioral cues and clues? Well, I guess to begin, if it was 100% effective, then me and the other people doing this would all be very rich and we maybe wouldn't be. Exactly.

wouldn't be, you know, but we, at the same time, I think so impossible to predict human behavior or always get inside the head and know why people did what they did or when or how they're going to do what they do. So all we can do is say, what are the best statistical probabilities? And that's what my research is focused on. But we also know that there's no theoretical or statistical reason why certain people, certain looks would commit a crime in a certain way. It doesn't make any sense. Instead, behavior and personality are so much more predictive. Somebody that is, let's say, more haphazard and spontaneous in their life. They may have difficulty maintaining a job. They may bounce a lot between relationships or change their life around a lot, move a lot. That same person is unlikely to be very organized

in the way they commit crime. Humans tend to be relatively consistent over time. So when you get up in the morning, you probably do relatively the same thing every day. Maybe get up, have a coffee, take a shower, then start work. It would be very unusual to one day get up and do one thing and then the next day just completely at random get up and do something different. So that's the underlying theory behind this, that our personality relates to our behavior in our everyday life and criminality is just one other type of behavior. It just so happens to be illegal behavior, but it's still a behavior. And so if you're very spontaneous and haphazard in the rest of the behaviors in your life, you're probably very spontaneous and haphazard in the rest of the years in your life, you're probably very spontaneous

and haphazard in this criminal behavior. Similarly, if you're very organized and premeditated and you're meticulous and you like to have your office clean and, you know, you think things through, chances are you're not going to go ahead and do something very spontaneous and random, like committed disorderly. So that's why personality and these different traits, the traits and motivations are far more predicted of behavior and they're better used when we're developing these types of profiles or typologies. Yeah, that's great insight. I noticed too in some of your papers, as you well know, in so many of our statistical techniques, we're looking at between versus within group differences and things like that. But I noticed you look between

burglars, some of that variance, and then also within the burglaries that an individual themselves commit. And it looks like that's what you're doing with LCA and so on to understand. Well, I think actually there's some fairly stable typologies here that these individuals, just as you said, remain consistent. That sounds like it's a major point that you're making based on your evidence. Yeah, we saw that there is a lot of consistency in their repeated behaviors over time and consistency in the behaviors they show in their everyday life and in the way they commit their crimes. So the only time we really saw any variation

in behavior was from the opportunistic burglars. They were sort of the gateway type of offender. It was not that common to have your first offense be an organized burglary. It seems like that was something that was more learned either over time and they got good at or better at versus someone who's opportunistic. They may just see something, they start it, they get into it, and then over time they become more organized, perhaps because they get better and they learn or they get caught and they learn. But that was really one of the only times we saw change occur. Otherwise, they tended to be really stable in their behaviors over time. Excellent. Interesting. Let me ask this. all your reading, your lit review, your research, and obviously through the review of research of others, what are some ideas that you and maybe others have about how this profiling process

might be improved by federal, state, local law enforcement, and again, by the asset protection people that are protecting their corporate executives, their employees, their buildings, people that are protecting their corporate executives, their employees, their buildings, their assets. Any thoughts on improving the efficacy, the accuracy, the usefulness even of profiles? Well, the biggest thing I can say is based on our research, doing it based upon gut feelings or heuristics or a more clinical approach is not the most accurate. It does not produce the best results. Being able to have statistical data and letting it speak for itself is by far the better approach

if you want to develop a more effective profile. But even then, that doesn't mean that it's going to be effective. It's only as good as the data that goes in. So I don't know, you know, across the country how great the data are on various, you know, types of offenses and the information they get about the offender. So it's important before we go crazy and start saying, well, here we developed a statistical profile. It's implemented everywhere. That's only step one. Step two is you need to test it and see how well it works. Heaven forbid it has an iterogenic effect, meaning that it backfires on you. It's worse than if you did nothing. That would be bad. And we

can't assume that just because we're doing this treatment or just because we're implementing a new profile or program, all of a sudden things are going to be better. And to your earlier point about cost-benefit, just because we are doing something doesn't mean that it's going to be worth it in the end. If we need to do trainings across the country and we need to collect data and we need to maintain databases to ensure that we're staying up to date on different cases and linking them together properly, all of that may cost a lot of money. And if we're not getting a good return in terms of reducing crime sufficiently, that it's taking a burden off of insurance, off of court costs, off of

prosecutors, off of police, off of victims, then we may not want to do that anymore. So I think, you know, as always, evidence-based solutions are the only way to go. And by developing these profiles using research data and then testing it and evaluating it before you implement will be the only recommendation that will be done. Yes, makes total sense that the clinical approach or others similar ways of arriving at profiles sounds like those are hypotheses now to be tested. And as you say, then situationally things do change so much as well. So it's, you know, we can't overfit a model. Now we've got a problem, an opposite problem that actually is the same. It's not accurate. Let me ask you one, another thing, and that is,

you know, we're talking about high rate, high impact offenders was a benefit of your typology that now you've got very limited time. Your citizenry are being victimized. We know that there are a lot of effects there. Now people may feel less confident. It can generate fear of crime and mistrust of others and all these dynamics that we don't want necessarily in our communities and with our family and loved ones. And so we're going to look at using typology. Okay, I'm going to identify who might be high-rate, high-impact offenders.

But there seems to be a little bit of, I wouldn't say it's divergence, but a little different way of looking when we're looking at using wrist-trained modeling and other tools to understand criminogenic, the built environment and elements around that that might be criminogenic. And so if we just understand more around that, that's very, very helpful at diagnosing and understand the mechanisms and dynamics there. My thought is, I want to run this by you, is that that is very helpful, but in my opinion, maybe should be combined with your approach as well, or at least what we're talking about right now today anyway. And that is, yes, but we also want to pay attention to high rate, high impact offenders and understand how they're committing their crimes and that

most people never do offend or at least age out of their offending. So what are your thoughts on combining these two broad tactics? I think absolutely this is an important area. I'm doing this exactly what you suggested with violent offenders and drug offenders for two different projects, also with agencies here in Florida. We want to look at the prolific offenders and the ones that are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. We know that approximately 6% of all offenders commit approximately 60% of all offenses. So if you're that detective and you have six different

burglaries committed the night before and they all fall on your desk, maybe rather than, you know, on average, 15% of the burglaries get solved. You may want to focus on the ones that are likely to be committed by prolific offenders because you know that arresting that person and preventing them from committing crime will have a far bigger impact on your environment than maybe the kids who did it once. They're not going to do it again. It was in a grill. It was just for fun one night, and they may have gotten scared that they won't do it again.

So I think that those are really important things to focus on, hot people, hot places, and of course, looking at the relationship between why certain people commit certain types of crimes. Yeah, excellent. And it just, it occurs to me, particularly, you know, I saw David Weisberg's short article in The Hill, and I'm sure you're on the mailing list, email list, but where they're making that point that we really, or we, law enforcement has become better and better, in our case, on the private side as well, at suppressing crime, offending, victimization. And so that, hey, where's the brownie point here? But not realizing maybe there are two constructs, with their time and resources, the scarce resources they have right now. And that could free up and maybe allow the so-called reform, but enhancement

of an agency to now let's free up resources to do the positive engagement, help people understand we're trying to be data-driven, evidence-based. We're going to spend more time and resources in certain places where we see that there are hot spots and hot people, and we are trying to understand that and then help do something about it. We want to enable you to live a happy, healthy, and safer life. But that's just a thought I had, that what you're doing can maybe help enable some of that and that all the work around the periphery as we move inward will maybe enable some of that.

So that was my big thought, if you will, that I think it's fantastic what you're doing and helping these agencies get better and better at doing that. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. at doing that. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. There you go. So, and I don't want to put you in a place you don't want to be, but that was my thought,

that I really think that that work is additive in so many ways, your work. I guess one last thing I was going to touch on is just adverse childhood events. And there's a team here, interdisciplinary with physicians and Chris Gibson and so on here working in criminology with them together on that and that trajectory, you know, the life course of these of people. But I saw that you did a little bit of work around some of the victimization of a child or one type of adverse event and then maybe how that affected their later behavior. Can you maybe touch on that

real quickly? Is that something that you're able to touch on? Yeah, of course. And I know a lot of the stuff we just mentioned, I went to UF for my master's. So we were looking at adverse childhood experiences and how it relates to these negative outcomes to include delinquency and offending. One of the big things we saw was that in addition to the negative health outcomes, which have been well established in the medical field, and the negative psychological outcomes, which have been well established in this psychology field, there's a lot of negative behavioral outcomes, such as chronic, prolific, and violent offending. So we were really, I guess, paused by this because you see this relationship between people who are victimized with adverse childhood experiences. These are various types of trauma, abuse, neglect, experiencing things that parents do in households which are very upsetting, such as domestic violence and drug use. And then the future behavior of these people.

So going on to be prolific offenders that, you know, 60% of crimes are committed by. And we just wanted to see if there's a way that we can intervene earlier on before crime is committed or before we need to have a, you know, a victim, you know, occur. How can we stop these from happening? And one way, because we know that ACEs increase the risk so much for these future negative outcomes, is prevent these ACEs from occurring. And if they do occur, try to do interventions that will help mitigate the effect of the ACEs. Trauma therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, multisystemic therapy, things that we know will help to undo some of the impact.

They'll never go away, but at least we won't see the same level of impact. And then hopefully, through research and evaluation, of course, we want to see, did it actually work? Is it cost-benefit? And is there a notable impact on the risk of future offending? And other types of negative health and mental health outcomes. That's excellent insight. And again, it goes to the bigger picture about what all can be done to support our fellow man, our communities, and help make them safer and more secure. Is there anything else, you know, you hear this from reporters all the time, anything I should

ask you that I have not asked you that might be helpful for listeners that are trying to use, to think about problems a little more deeply and understand them for action? And then also the evidence-based approach. Anything else that I'm missing here, Brianna? Um, I feel like I would say is before people, you know, just read the paper, or I mean, I'd be thrilled if they did, but before that, they just read it and then maybe implement it. There's no one silver bullet that's going to solve crime or prevent crime. It's far more complicated than that. And I would suggest either reaching out to a local university or an expert that they see from one of these papers. practitioners or members of the community reach out to us and say they've read our work or say they've heard of us and they would like to use something that we've done to help make the world a safer place. It's the biggest compliment. That's why I'm so thrilled to be here on this podcast today. But I would recommend that for anyone who's going to be implementing something like this,

just because you want to make sure that there's a full understanding of what's being done, just because you want to make sure that there's a full understanding of what's being done, how it's being done, and of course, to evaluate it. And if it's not working, if your situation is slightly different than the way it was developed or intended to be used, tweaking it, revising it, or conducting a new study that will help people who are like you for a situation, that would all be really beneficial. Great advice. Translational science is hopefully what most of us are in it for, the science to practice concept. So I really like to hear that as well. And yeah, rest assured, I've read quite a few of your papers, but I think more

importantly, as you're saying, that unfortunately not many people have access to, much less read or have the time to read peer-reviewed journal articles. Or as you're saying, they do take a lot of exposure and context sometimes to make sense about what in the world. So yes, we want to make sure that, and so that's great. And I think it's neat to have resources like yourself out there that the practitioners, that those that are trying to work on, the policymakers and so on, can work on that. And they're finding it, some of them are finding it difficult at the best of times and even more difficult now between the pandemic. And now there's a lot of tension out there and people are trying to recapture their ground and maintain their balance, I guess, is what I'm trying to say in these times. maintain their balance, I guess is what I'm trying to say in these times. So it's fantastic to hear from you and that offer to help people better translate what we're seeing and thinking to

real practice and then work with us to help tweak that, dial that in, let's dose it properly. So, well, thank you again for your time. We're thrilled and excited to have you involved and engaged with our community and anytime, anything we can do, we'd love to. And of course we're right up and down the road from each other. So maybe we'll see when things clear up, if you'd be interested in a visit and see our, some of our labs where we create these environments and simulations and, and things like that, that might be of some interest and, and go from there.

So thank you, Brianna, for joining us today on Crime Science. Absolutely. Thanks for having me today on Crime Science. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And good luck to everybody listening. Thank you. Everybody stay safe out there. Thanks for listening to Crime Science, the podcast. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science podcast presented by the Laws Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security.

If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the LF Prevention Research Council.